Your success means nothing in life. It’s forgotten in one generation, two at best.

But your emotional health lives for hundreds of generations after in the lives of everyone you touch and their descendants.

Be the pebble that drops in the ocean and ripples its waves to every shore in the world.

Success is not that pebble. Helping someone feel good is.

CREATIVITY:

Nothing happens in the world because of thought. Or because of talking. Or because of writing.

It happens because of DO-ing.

Gandhi can talk all day about “peace”. But he had to sit in front of a tank to stop war.

Elon Musk can theorize about ships to Mars all day. But he invested every last dime of money he had, and without formal training, hired the right people and built a rocket that went into space.

JK Rowling could have moaned about her divorce and the trials of being a single parent.

But she wrote a page a day. Got rejected by 25 out of 26 publishers. She cried for a special little boy hiding in a closet. And then wrote the most iconic children’s series in history.

We are all faced with our personal frontiers.

What makes humans so special (what makes YOU so special) is that we are the only species that can adapt to new environments.

We are the only species that can explore beyond our frontier.

It’s our evolutionary MANDATE to explore that frontier: creatively, emotionally, spiritually, physically in every way every day. Every day. This is the mantra: EVERY DAY.

Stress and anxiety will only take away our energy for today and steal our dreams for tomorrow.

Anxiety evolved in primates millions of years ago to protect us in the jungle. Now our brains stupidly think the cubicle and a to-do list is the jungle. It isn’t. It will never be.

I told this to a good friend of mine last night about a business he is launching today. He was so nervous he was almost crying. “I can’t stop,” he told me.

When I suggested to him that his brain was trying to trick him and why, he said, “I keep thinking of ‘my list’ over and over again.”

And since the last time you thought of your list, have you done anything?

“There’s nothing to do?” he said, “It’s 9pm!”.

I was about to go on stage to do standup comedy at a club he was part owner of. I had four minutes left. He said, “Wait! You’re going on in four minutes. Don’t let me distract you.”

“You’re not distracting me. But your business is going to fail if you keep letting your stress distract you. You’re not in the jungle. You’re in a comedy club!”

He laughed. “Ok, what should I do?”

“Go see Wonder Woman,” I said. And then write me what you think of it. He laughed and left. I went on stage. He wrote me later. He loved Chris Pine!

As my friend Gary Gulman says, “Who should believe in god more than Chris Pine? He is Wonder Woman’s love interest and he is Captain Kirk and he’s 36 years old. I’m 46 and I eat Chipotle four meals a week.”

***

“Charlie, how did you get out of your anxiety?” I asked him on the podcast.

He told me what happened to him in his worst week.

“A close friend attempted suicide and a family member died so I took a week off,” he said.

He was working with Tim Ferriss. He wanted to prove himself. For those who don’t know him, I can safely confirm that Tim is a legit super-genius. Charlie was working 22 hours a day to keep up.

Our bodies were built to hunt and gather and move. Humans aren’t meant to stay still.

“The research is pretty clear,” Charlie said. “They have done experiments. They’ve deprive animals of play—they give them love, nurturing, food, shelter, all the things they need to survive— but they deprive them of play, the animal inevitably grows up to be socially and emotionally crippled.”

Charlie calls it “chronic-play deprivation.” And I think many people suffer from that.